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NVIDIA GeForce 6200 Preview October 11, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With shader model 3.0 support, a 300MHz core with 550MHz memory, an integrated video processor, and dual 400MHz RAMDACs, NVIDIA's GeForce 6200 is poised to take on the value graphics market. Read all about this upcoming card's features and how we think it will stack up to the competition in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 2 ) |
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Designed to appeal to the consumer on a budget who’s upgrading his system from an integrated graphics solution, the GeForce 6200 is NVIDIA’s latest part for the value market, where the bulk of sales takes place. The GeForce 6200 is a PCI Express-only part, NVIDIA has no plans for an AGP version, so you won’t see consumers upgrading from their GeForce2 MX’s or other older cards to it.
Like NVIDIA’s other GeForce 6 series cards, the GeForce 6200 supports shader model 3.0 and is based on NVIDIA’s new NV4x architecture, which has been revamped to drastically improve 2.0 shader performance and anti-aliasing quality via a new rotated-grid sampling pattern, NVIDIA has also integrated a new video processor on all GeForce 6 products. While this product hasn’t officially launched yet (drivers to enable it on today’s GeForce 6800 and 6600 parts are in the works), NVIDIA has gone on the record to state that it will provide on-chip MPEG-2/WMV9 decoding as well as video encoding via a new “motion estimation engine”.
In order to keep manufacturing cost down, GeForce 6200 features half as many pipelines as GeForce 6600, four instead of eight. One texture unit per pixel pipeline is paired alongside, giving the GeForce 6200 the same 4x1 architecture as ATI’s DX9 value offering for the PCI Express market, RADEON X300. NVIDIA clocks GeForce 6200’s core at 300MHz, 25MHz slower than X300, while the board ships with a 128-bit memory interface that’s clocked at 275MHz (550MHz effective). This figure is 75MHz higher than X300, giving the GeForce 6200 significantly more memory bandwidth.
To further reduce costs, NVIDIA drops the z and color compression algorithms found in GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6600, so the AA engine isn’t as robust. This will result in reduced performance at high resolutions and/or the use of anti-aliasing/anisotropic filtering. The 64-bit texture filtering and blending found in the 6800 and 6600 series, as well as SLI are also omitted from GeForce 6200.
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Like GeForce 6600, GeForce 6200 is based on TSMC’s 0.11-micron manufacturing process and still features dual 400MHz RAMDACs for TwinView support. NVIDIA only mentions one GeForce 6600 SKU, but we wouldn’t be surprised if additional variants are added later. After all, we’ve seen NVIDIA go back and add additional cards as the market requires, the GeForce FX 5700 LE and GeForce FX 5900 XT being popular recent examples.
| Our impressions | Page:: ( 2 / 2 ) |
Unfortunately, we don’t have a reference GeForce 6200 board, so we can’t provide benchmark figures for you, but we can come to some general conclusions based on the board’s specifications as we know them, and the competitive landscape of today’s 3D market.
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First, with an estimated street price of $129 for a 128MB card and $149 for a 256MB board, the GeForce 6200 will be priced very close to NVIDIA’s already announced GeForce 6600. The base model GeForce 6600 ships with a 300MHz core clock, but sports twice as many pipelines and a fully-featured Intellisample AA engine. In other words, we expect it to deliver roughly twice the performance of GeForce 6200 and only cost a little bit more.
Therefore, for gamers looking for a card that will deliver the most performance with today’s games such as DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2, we’d recommend the low-end mainstream cards such as the RADEON X700 and GeForce 6600 over 6200. You’ll pay a little bit more but we believe you’ll likely get significantly better performance. The introduction of these cards, as well as GeForce 6200 will likely force ATI to lower prices on RADEON X600 and X300, but to what extent we just don’t know yet.
NVIDIA expects the 6200 to perform and eventually be priced similarly to the RADEON X600 PRO, but we won’t know that answer until the GeForce 6200 debuts, NVIDIA doesn’t expect that to occur until late November. Based on NVIDIA’s track record with GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6600 and the fact that we don’t have a 6200 board yet, we wouldn’t be surprised if that ship date slips a little bit.
In short, while we’re glad to see another inexpensive DirectX 9 option out there, we think most of our readers will be better served by going with one of the 8 pipeline mainstream cards. We already have a retail version of one of these cards, the Sapphire Hybrid RADEON X700 PRO, and will be posting a review later this week. In the meantime, the GeForce 6200 will no doubt offer a substantial performance improvement over the DX9 integrated graphics that are prevalent on most value systems, and has all the ingredients to deliver more performance than ATI’s RADEON X300, but with the increasing demands of today’s latest games we really think you’d have a more enjoyable experience with one of the more robust lower end mainstream cards. If you truly can’t afford one of these cards however, or don’t see yourself playing any of these games in the near future, the GeForce 6200 would serve nicely. It’s dual 400MHz RAMDACs and video processor should make it a capable solution for these applications.